Hi,

I have a huge problem with a laserdisc I got. Its Space Ace and its CAV. From the first frame on the sound is noisy and the real sound is only heard softly in the background of the noise. There are often video artefacts within the picture, but from frame 20000 on it starts to skip and at 21000 it cant jump over given bad frames anymore at all. But the surprising part is that the surface looks perfectly fine. No laserrot, no scratches, perfectly shiny and I could see the sections of a CAV laserdisc. Any idea how to save that laserdisc?

Thanks in advance!

Sounds like it's suffering disc rot. I have a couple of discs with similar issues and the disc surfaces look totally fine.

Might be someone here who can provide a far more informed answer but with my limited knowledge I'm assuming it's disc rot and it's not repairable alas.

As teddanson has said sounds like the dreaded rot, many discs that look okay can be affected.

If your other LDs are playing fine sadly it looks like a disc problem.

Nobody on this planet can physically see laser rot.

That’s not true. Rot can be visible...but usually only after it has long been too rotted to play.

It’s also possible your disc is warped, which is usually fixable.

You also have no posts and no mention of what player you are using so we’ll need to know that also in order to condemn the disc. If you only own one disc and one player purchased on the day then either one could be the issue.

I've had defective discs that I could see the issue but they weren't rotted, it was separation.

I’d say it’s the same thing since the glue has gone off in either case. I’m mainly thinking of rotted discs that also show “bronzing”, which are rare. Usually a rotted disc looks perfect to the eye.

EDIT: This could be spam, btw. It reads like an old Usenet post. We’ll see, I guess.

Yep, I also got Dragons Lair and that had also some small issues at the last minutes of content. But after cleaning the disc it played perfectly fine. And all my other laserdiscs also play fine on my CLD-2950. But as I mentioned: I never seen before laser rot without the typical oxitized layer at the surface.

All of my laser "roted" discs are perfectly visible. And the reason for that is given: Its oxygen capsuled between the plastic layer and the metal layer. And this oxygen starts to oxitize the metal layer. And if this happens you get good, old rust. Its almost impossible to not see it at the surface. The only possibility where it cant be visible is if there is such a small bubble of oxygen encapsulated that it destroys one small part of data without starting to rusting. But in this case only a small part of the laserdisc would get defected and not the whole "track". Thats why laser rot usually starts from the outer boarders. Glue often starts to dry out after all this decades and when it becomes porous air gets into the the disc at the outer boarders. And oxitizing starts.

I changed my signature now. I use an Pioneer CLD-2950. That one play almost every other laserdisc fine. I also got Dragons Lair and that one had skipps at the last minutes of the content. But after cleaning it it also played fine. I rechecked now the laserdisc and its almost perfectly flat (as flat as every other laserdisc I use for sure). But Ive seen now that there are a lot of micro scratches on the surface. Perhaps I could try this Novus 1 2 3 Plastic Polishing of Laserdiscs?

And BTW The strange part is that the sound is defected all the time. Mainly its analogue noise and softly at the background sometimes you could hear the real sound. But ... skipping of the frames starts at appr. the middle of the content. Shouldnt laser rot start at either the beginning or, typically, at the end of the discs content? And one more thing: This disc is built by Pioneer. Ive never got laser rot laserdiscs from Pioneer, cause they always knew how to manufacture laserdiscs. Laser rot was something I mainly got at the golden laserdiscs. This manufacturing where obviously as cheap and bad as possible.

Trust us when we say that laser rot does does not usually show any visible signs on the disc at all. If you can see a lot of nastiness going on under the plastic it’s not typical rot.

Very fine scratches are invisible to the player. I wouldn’t waste time polishing it.

Rot can exist anywhere on either side of any disc.

Some players will play through rot better than others and it’s basically random. Don’t assume a better player will play rot better because nobody ever designed a player to play rotted discs.

Most LD arcade games are from the earlier days of LD when rot was much more common, but even then the discs outlasted the players usually.

Age has very little to do with rot, quality is everything.

Bad storage can make any disc rot eventually.

Typically “rot” shows as multi-colored snow and the sound with analog discs will get hissy and then eventually it will look like you need to tune into your local VHF station a little better and then at some point the player won’t play them anymore.

The vast majority of rotted discs are either from the earliest days of LD (lets say pre-1986) or from one crappy plant in the UK or one crappy plant in the US. %99 of all made in Japan discs after 1990 are rot free.

The vast majority of rot is not visible to the eye. The discs look perfectly fine.

Light scratches and fingerprints don't matter much.

I would also try it in another player. Sounds like it probably has laser rot but if the issue gets worse as the playback moves toward the outer edge that usually points at the focus servo our of adjustment.

don't toss it, if its rotted I'll take it and pay you shipping.
rotted won't be worth anything but I would like one for my collection.

I have a Space Ace disc with the same level of rot.

There are different kinds of rot - like different kinds of cancer. There is poor metalization which will cause rot symptoms on playback (usually on Technidisc titles, and DiscoVision). Rot from Philips UK can be visible, resembling water stains coming from the edge. But that's not always an indication. Rot from Technidisc can be visible or not. Rot from Pioneer is almost always invisible. The same is true for DADC/Sony and Mitsubishi. The discs look fine.

As said above and elsewhere, there is no way to recover a rotted disc. If it's pretty, you can mount it on the wall (which is what I plan to do with my rotted Space Ace disc).

Thats strange. Cause the Dragons Lair laserdisc (which was released one year earlier) plays almost perfect. Especially the picture and the sound are almost free of artefacts. And its also from Pioneer. So i dont think that it depends on the age of the product. And about rot: rot isnt something magical. Its simple oxidation of metal cause some cheap manufacturing process didnt avoided air bubbles between the layers of the laserdisc. And when a laserdisc is as defective as this one (the sound is horrible from the first second on and also, at least small, video artefacts are there from the beginning on), then it must be something else, cause rot always means rust (thats the brown area we see at every rotted laserdisc). A laserdisc in such a horrible status as my Space Ace laserdisc should have more brown then any other areas on its surface . I presume that this comes from an faulty production line where the metallic layer was defective from the beginning on. I hope that not every Space Ace laserdisc comes from that one line. And BTW: Pioneer usually got the best laserdisc quality. Never had any problem before that one laserdisc.

And im also going to put it into a frame. Too bad the shiny side is on the backside .

Thanks, but im not going to trash it. Its too cool to got the original laserdisc which was used back then at the arcade. Going to put it into a frame (like some user did with his laserdisc).

Does this one have a metal side????
Wonder if the player can't handle the extra weight????
If disc has metal side only industrial players can handle those types of LDs.

We all know that rot is oxidation of the aluminum layer. Knowing that doesn’t do much to take the mystery out of rot. It’s very mysterious. I think Blam1’s analogy to cancer is right on. It comes in all kinds. When you say, “ A laserdisc in such a horrible status as my Space Ace laserdisc should have more brown then any other areas on its surface.” after all of our posts saying that rot is usually totally invisible...are you not listening? And yes, age is irrelevant. If it mattered then at some point all the discs from the LD arcade period would all be dead. Then ten years later all the discs ten years newer that that would die, on a schedule. As it is I have seen rotters come out of the package that way weeks after manufacture, and I own discs older than Space Ace than have zero rot even now. It’s not a time bomb, it’s a land mine.

Since I mainly do anime on JP release my personal experience with rot is minimal however there are members where who have manually binned 100+ rotted discs over the years and they know what they are talking about.

My fault was that I thought aluminum oxidizes in the same way as iron. It doesnt. Aluminum oxides by putting a white film over the metal. So either way .... you will perfectly realize optically if a laserdisc is oxitized or not. So I presume that this began as some sort of pointless bubble ("Rot cant be seen, cause I have so many faulty laserdiscs which look fine"). And as with most internet bubble noone dared to discuss such an pointless argument (there are for example people which still believe that the trash found in the desert really were Ataris junk. Not thinking for a second why there also were games included in this trash which sold perfectly well at that period of time (like Berzerk or others). But the bubble still goes "We found Ataris trashcan in the desert". Most gaming historians already see that documentation in the meantime as a fraud. Most likely that was the trash of a nearby warehouse sorted out when the Atari VCS games completely stopped selling during the late 80s. And trashing it somewhere in the desert is the cheapiest way to get rid of that junk)). So if you cant see any less reflective aluminum layer on your laserdisc the simple truth is .... it was defective all the time. the produced trash at the factory. Manufacturing laserdiscs was back then expensive and the process wasnt verified as we would to it today. So yes, there were indeed many faulty laserdiscs produced and sold. The same thing happened with early Audio CDs.

But I dont want to destroy any believe. The fact is that this laserdisc cant be repaired . So thanks for all your help.

For Space Ace I presume that it was produced faulty. The Space Ace laserdisc werent produced in high volumes and therefor such a small release werent that interesting for Pioneer. That doenst maean that all Space Ace laserdiscs are faulty, but many of them are.